National Melancholy

National Melancholy PDF Author: Mitchell Robert Breitwieser
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804755818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Breitwieser's close readings reveal that the thwarting of mourning, partly linked to nationalist feeling, was a central issue for many American authors, but that those who successfully reclaimed mourning came to strange and fresh understandings of the actual world.

National Melancholy

National Melancholy PDF Author: Mitchell Robert Breitwieser
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804755818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Breitwieser's close readings reveal that the thwarting of mourning, partly linked to nationalist feeling, was a central issue for many American authors, but that those who successfully reclaimed mourning came to strange and fresh understandings of the actual world.

American Melancholy

American Melancholy PDF Author: Laura D. Hirshbein
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813545846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
As American Melancholy reveals, if you read about depression anywhere today--medical journal, popular magazine, National Institute of Mental Health pamphlet, or pharmaceutical company drug promotional literature--you will find three main pieces of information either explicitly stated or strongly implied: depression is a disease (like any other physical disease); it is extraordinarily prevalent in the world; and it occurs about twice as frequently in women as in men. Yet, depression was not classified as a disease until the 1980 publication of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III (DSM-III). How is it that such an illness, thought to affect between 14 and 17 million Americans, was not specifically defined until the late twentieth century? American Melancholy traces the growth of depression as an object of medical study and as a consumer commodity and illustrates how and why depression came to be such a huge medical, social, and cultural phenomenon. It is the first book to address gender issues in the construction of depression, explores key questions of how its diagnosis was developed, how it has been used, and how we should question its application in American society.

Lincoln's Melancholy

Lincoln's Melancholy PDF Author: Joshua Wolf Shenk
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054752689X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 538

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Book Description
A nuanced psychological portrait of Abraham Lincoln that finds his legendary political strengths rooted in his most personal struggles. Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the President’s character and his leadership. Mired in personal suffering as a young man, Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health. Shenk draws on seven years of research from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of Lincoln’s unhappiness. In the process, Shenk discovers that the President’s coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Washington Post Book World, Atlanta Journal-Constituion, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette As Featured on the History Channel documentary Lincoln “Fresh, fascinating, provocative.”—Sanford D. Horwitt, San Francisco Chronicle “Some extremely beautiful prose and fine political rhetoric and leaves one feeling close to Lincoln, a considerable accomplishment.”—Andrew Solomon, New York Magazine “A profoundly human and psychologically important examination of the melancholy that so pervaded Lincoln's life.”—Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., author of An Unquiet Mind

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation

Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation PDF Author: David L. Eng
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002689
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation critic David L. Eng and psychotherapist Shinhee Han draw on case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore the social and psychic predicaments of Asian American young adults from Generation X to Generation Y. Combining critical race theory with several strands of psychoanalytic thought, they develop the concepts of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to investigate changing processes of loss associated with immigration, displacement, diaspora, and assimilation. These case studies of first- and second-generation Asian Americans deal with a range of difficulties, from depression, suicide, and the politics of coming out to broader issues of the model minority stereotype, transnational adoption, parachute children, colorblind discourses in the United States, and the rise of Asia under globalization. Throughout, Eng and Han link psychoanalysis to larger structural and historical phenomena, illuminating how the study of psychic processes of individuals can inform investigations of race, sexuality, and immigration while creating a more sustained conversation about the social lives of Asian Americans and Asians in the diaspora.

American Melancholy

American Melancholy PDF Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063035286
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
A new collection of poetry from an American literary legend, her first in twenty-five years Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most insightful observers of the human heart and mind, and, with her acute social consciousness, one of the most insistent and inspired witnesses of a shared American history. Oates is perhaps best known for her prodigious output of novels and short stories, many of which have become contemporary classics. However, Oates has also always been a faithful writer of poetry. American Melancholy showcases some of her finest work of the last few decades. Covering subjects big and small, and written in an immediate and engaging style, this collection touches on both the personal and political. Loss, love, and memory are investigated, along with the upheavals of our modern age, the reality of our current predicaments, and the ravages of poverty, racism, and social unrest. Oates skillfully writes characters ranging from a former doctor at a Chinese People’s Liberation Army hospital to Little Albert, a six-month-old infant who took part in a famous study that revealed evidence of classical conditioning in human beings.

Cultural Melancholy

Cultural Melancholy PDF Author: Jermaine Singleton
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252097718
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
A daring cultural and literary studies investigation, Cultural Melancholy explores the legacy of unresolved grief produced by ongoing racial oppression and resistance in the United States. Using acute analysis of literature, drama, musical performance, and film, Singleton demonstrates how rituals of racialization and resistance transfer and transform melancholy discreetly across time, consolidating racial identities and communities along the way. He also argues that this form of impossible mourning binds racialized identities across time and social space by way of cultural resistance efforts. Singleton develops the concept of "cultural melancholy" as a response to scholarship that calls for the separation of critical race studies and psychoanalysis, excludes queer theoretical approaches from readings of African American literatures and cultures, and overlooks the status of racialized performance culture as a site of serious academic theorization. In doing so, he weaves critical race studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and performance studies into conversation to uncover a host of hidden dialogues—psychic and social, personal and political, individual and collective—for the purpose of promoting a culture of racial grieving, critical race consciousness, and collective agency. Wide-ranging and theoretically bold, Cultural Melancholy counteracts the racial legacy effects that plague our twenty-first century multiculture.

The Melancholy of Race

The Melancholy of Race PDF Author: Anne Anlin Cheng
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195350804
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study Anne Anlin Cheng argues that we have to understand racial grief not only as the result of racism but also as a foundation for racial identity. The Melancholy of Race proposes that racial identification is itself already a melancholic act--a social category that is imaginatively supported through a dynamic of loss and compensation, by which the racial other is at once rejected and retained. Using psychoanalytic theories on mourning and melancholia as inroads into her subject, Cheng offers a closely observed and carefully reasoned account of the minority experience as expressed in works of art by, and about, Asian-Americans and African-Americans. She argues that the racial minority and dominant American culture both suffer from racial melancholia and that this insight is crucial to a productive reimagining of progressive politics. Her discussion ranges from "Flower Drum Song" to "M. Butterfly," Brown v. Board of Education to Anna Deavere Smith's "Twilight," and Invisible Man to The Woman Warrior, in the process demonstrating that racial melancholia permeates our fantasies of citizenship, assimilation, and social health. Her investigations reveal the common interests that social, legal, and literary histories of race have always shared with psychoanalysis, and situates Asian-American and African-American identities in relation to one another within the larger process of American racialization. A provocative look at a timely subject, this study is essential reading for anyone interested in race studies, critical theory, or psychoanalysis.

Encyclopedia of Depression [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of Depression [2 volumes] PDF Author: Linda Wasmer Andrews
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313353670
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 638

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Book Description
Written in clear, nontechnical language, and filled with lively historical and cultural highlights, this comprehensive reference work is a scientifically grounded yet thoroughly readable introduction to depressive disorders. What distinguishes normal everyday emotional swings from debilitating, clinically identified depression? What are the defining symptoms, manifestations, and treatments? What is life like for people suffering from depression and for those who care for them? The Encyclopedia of Depression is for all those needing answers to questions like these—individuals, families, health professionals, or anyone fascinated by this pervasive condition. Written in clear, nontechnical language and highlighting fascinating historical and cultural perspectives on the topic, this two-volume resource presents a complete contemporary portrait of depressive disorders, summarizing the latest scientific, medical, and societal thinking on a wide variety of depression-related topics. Coverage includes causes, risk factors, symptoms, diagnosis and prevention, and a wide range of treatment options, including psychotherapy, medication, biological treatments, alternative therapies and lifestyle approaches. In addition, the encyclopedia discusses historical and cross cultural perspectives on the condition, including the dramatic shifts in public awareness and cultural attitudes toward the disease and the devastation it can cause.

The Age of Melancholy

The Age of Melancholy PDF Author: Dan G. Blazer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135433070
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Depression has become the most frequently diagnosed chronic mental illness, and is a disability encountered almost daily by mental health professionals of all trades. "Major Depression" is a medical disease, which some would argue has reached epidemic proportions in contemporary society, and it affects our bodies and brains just like any other disease. Why, this book asks, has the incidence of depression been on such an increase in the last 50 years, if our basic biology hasn't changed as rapidly? To find answers, Dr. Blazer looks at the social forces, cultural and environmental upheavals, and other external, group factors that have undergone significant change. In so doing, the author revives the tenets of social psychiatry, the process of looking at social trends, environmental factors, and correlations among groups in efforts to understand psychiatric disorders.

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels PDF Author: Katarzyna Nowak McNeice
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429655312
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion’s novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion’s interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion’s fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion’s oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion’s fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion’s fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity – which is the central theme this monograph addresses.